I have always had a giant fondness for stories about people with more than human abilities. Telepaths, vampires, fairies, whatever, I love them all. And probably my favorite sub-genre of metahuman fiction is the superhero genre.

For "Heroes & Villains" I pictured a world where superheroes are like the police and supervillains are just criminals. There's a lot of praise for the famous superheroes, but the just everyday ones don't get much attention at all. To that end, my mind spawned Darkstar, this super hot supervillain that's really just enjoying the hell out of being the bad guy. He breaks the law, but he's super charming and people don't even really get mad at what he does.

I came up with this great character, so I had to give him some kind of back story because people don't just pop up fully formed. It's then that I decided he was going to be an ex-hero, because I've always thought that being the good guy all the time must be boring as hell. Sometimes it's good to be able to just let loose, so having to always be a goody-goody would be awful.

I wondered why he didn't become an anti-hero. He didn't even consider it, just jumped straight into being a supervillain. There had to be some reason why he had decided to go that route. I mean, to switch from wanting to save lives, to not caring about anyone but himself, something serious had to be going on.

That's where Blue Ice came in. He's more of an antihero, though that's not how the public sees him. To the world at large, he's the League of Superheroes' golden boy. He was born into a superhero family and was molded by his father into the perfect superhero, and though he rebelled when he was a teenager, after the death of his father he took up the mantle of hero. He may have hated the man, but some part of him wanted to please him too.

He joined the Teen Demis when he was sixteen years old, which is where he met his best friend Caspian Dukes, a half-Atlantean with webbed fingers and toes and more than human strength. And for years Blue Ice was the penultimate hero while he's dying inside a little more each day.

I pictured a love between two men on opposing sides. Darkstar thoroughly enjoying being bad, and Blue Ice getting more and more tired of saving others when he's not even happy in himself.

I like the idea that Blue Ice had both a positive and negative effect on Darkstar. And in the reverse, I like that Darkstar brought back Blue Ice's joy in living and in helping the world around him.

And throughout their story there's other people doing all kinds of things in the background, from murdering superheroes to committing war crimes.

So to that end, I think this is a 135,000 word slice of life story. It's just that the life being sliced happens to belong to two men with awesome power.